1,182 days, 1,854 entries ... Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
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“The AI system renders all text as gibberish, but then again Jenny Holzer’s text nowadays is becoming harder and harder to read.”
–
Hyperallergic ’s
Hrag Vartanian , comparing views of Jenny Holzer’s current “
Demented Words “ exhibition with an uncanny
DALL-E interpretation of the gallery’s press release. “It could easily be mistaken for the work of Holzer,” Vartanian notes about the machine rendering, “maybe one that ‘questions legibility and our ability to read without understanding …’—sorry, I couldn’t resist.”
“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, says Oscar Wilde. Does that count for AI models that create music in the style of Chopin?”
After its recent site-specific debut at Tieranatomisches Theater, Berlin, the online component of Rachel Rossin ’s transmedia narrative THE MAW OF (2022) launches on Artport , the Whitney Museum’s portal for internet art. Co-commissioned by Berlin’s KW Institute , the Web and AR experience follows a ghostly female figure navigating a landscape of cyborgian codes and prosthetic symbolism that is directly inspired by Rossin’s research into brain-computer interfaces.
“When people feel they are not being heard, they may resort to different measures to get their message across. In the case of programmers, they have the unique ability to protest through their code.”
– University of Melbourne software engineering lecturer
Christoph Treude , on ‘protestware’—programmers sabotaging their own software to make a political point. Categorizing these interventions as “malignant, benign, and developer sanctions,” Treude takes stock of related ethical and technical implications.
OUT NOW :
Vitalik Buterin
Proof of Stake
Collected essays by the Ethereum co-founder making the case for blockchain-powered collaboration and governance
NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) successfully impacts its target, demonstrating the potential for future asteroid deflection and planetary defence. After ten months of flying in space, NASA’s spacecraft crashed directly into Dimorphos , a 160 metre moonlet orbiting the larger asteroid Didymos . More than a feat of precise guidance and navigation, the test was “a mission of unity with a real benefit for all humanity,” says NASA Administrator Bill Nelson.
“Spiders have been on this planet for almost 280 million years, we humans only for 300,000. With this Open Letter for Invertebrate Rights , we say: ‘Spiders have a right to go to the museum, too.’”
–
Tomás Saraceno , advocating for creepy crawlies at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum. Thanks to the artist, museum staff agreed to “recognize spider webs as art” during the “
Crawling Creatures ” exhibition (that features one of Saraceno’s
spider/web sculptures)
Taipei’s Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab (C-LAB) opens “The Unrestricted Society,” a group show probing the freedoms brought about by modern technology. Curator Chuang Wei-Tzu gathers works by Memo Akten , Paolo Cirio , Cheng Hsien-Yu , Theresa Schubert , Chang Yung-Ta and others that investigate agency in the age of mass surveillance. Kyriaki Goni ’s CGI narrative Not Allowed for Algorithmic Audiences (2021, image), for example, features a smart assistant bent on reconciling humans and machines.
“You don’t break into someone’s house to show them you can break into their house. You shouldn’t do it unless they ask you to.”
– Suresh Venkatasubramanian, former White House tech adviser and Brown University professor, on Dries Depoorter’s “subversive” art project
The Follower (2022). The new work juxtapozes Instagram photos with public webcam footage that shows the process of taking them—without the recorded people’s permission. “If one person can do this, what can a government do?” the Belgian artist counters.
“Refined Vision,” an exhibition in which Kuwaiti artist Monira Al Qadir draws parallels between Texas Gulf Coast and Persian Gulf region petro-cultures, opens at the Blaffer Art Museum in Houston. Featured works include Crude Eye (2022, image), a new single-channel video piece on landscapes and infrastructures of extraction, and Spectrum
“If you look at TikTok your body is literally animated by the algorithm—it tells you how to move yourself—and you end up dancing for this abstract formulation of capital and algorithmic recommendation.”
– Online subculture researcher
Joshua Citarella , describing the diminishing agency of internet content creators. In his assessment, “people were able to make targeted critical interventions … shape it [media] with intent,” a decade ago—now users “are instrumentalized by the algorithim itself.”
OUT NOW :
The Posthumanist #1
A new periodical offering fresh perspectives on posthumanism and feminist new materialism
Duke University researchers develop a novel method of encrypting text, harnessing the chaos of computer simulated bacterial growth. Expanding on their recent article in data science journal Patterns , the team summarizes their use of machine learning frame-by-frame analysis of organic reaction–diffusion system animations to en- and decode text strings. “These patterns in essence constitutes a new, digitally generated coding scheme, which we call Emorfi,” they write .
“There’s money involved, there are systems and governments involved to make it. It’s a misdirect from the real history of that place, and the meaning and kinships that people have built there over millennia.”
– Assiniboine Native American art historian Alicia Harris, on the problematic politics—erasure of Indigenous culture—enacted by Michael Heizer’s
City (2022), and other land art (by settler artists) sited in the American Southwest
What Just Happened :
Miriam Arbus Cultivates “Seed Systems” That Nurture New XR Ecologies
The Canadian curator discusses interfaces, immersion, the metaverse, and prototyping new forms of human-nature relations in digital space
“This type of work I call ‘attention fracking,’ where a pool of valuable attention is gathered around an issue and then mined by opportunists who know that the public just needs a painkiller on the issue.”
– Artist and
Kimchi and Chips co-founder Elliot Woods, on the shallowness of
Sustainable Locks , a kinetic sculpture
Breakfast created for Tiffany’s Manhatten flagship store. “The artwork does nothing to talk about or acknowledge sustainability despite desperately wanting to,” fumes Woods.
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